We shared interests, humor, and great chemistry ... then she asked about our 'values'



I matched with Jane on OkCupid. Not Tinder (which is for hookups). Not Hinge (which is for hookups with intellectuals). But OkCupid, which is — in the online dating world — a kind of normie land.

That’s where the more ordinary, more boring singles go to meet people they can do boring things with (meet for coffee, etc.).

'You don’t have to live like this. You can just have coffee with a person.'

Jane was above average in looks. She had a job. She liked stuff I liked. She didn’t have pictures of herself doing sexy poses on a yacht. Or sneering and holding up her middle finger to the camera.

She seemed nice. Like genuinely nice. And normal. Possibly sane. That’s a serious win in the online dating realm.

The fine art of small talk

We texted back and forth on the OkCupid app, chatting, getting to know each other.

When our conversation reached a natural lull, I proposed a coffee date for later that week. I suggested a quiet café in the city. She said yes.

For the next couple of days, I daydreamed about our meeting. I felt like even if we didn’t fall in love, it would still be nice to have coffee with a relaxed, easygoing person.

This is often the best part of dating: those moments of happy anticipation, of feeling pleasantly excited about a date.

A surprise message!

But then, on the night before our date, I got a new message from Jane. I thought she was going to cancel. That happens a lot. People get cold feet.

Before I even opened her message, I considered how I might convince her to go through with our meeting. I often got cold feet myself before internet dates. Everybody did.

I would remind her it was just coffee, just a half-hour of her time. And the café was nice. You could look out the window. Why not? You only live once ...

I opened her message. It wasn’t cold feet. She was writing because we hadn’t discussed our “values” in our previous messaging. Shared values were important to her in a relationship, she said. She wanted to confirm that we were “on the same page” in that regard.

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How to respond?

I was surprised by this message. This didn’t sound like the person I had been texting with before. She hadn’t mentioned her values in our previous conversation. She didn’t put them in her profile. That’s why I liked her!

I hadn’t put my values in my profile either. Like what kind of values was she even talking about? Did she mean things like being an honest and upstanding guy? I try to do that.

Or did “values” just mean political positions? Like on immigration reform, or abortion, or mail-in ballots?

This was a tricky situation. I would have to think about it.

Boys vs. girls

The problem was, I’m a guy. When I think of “values,” I think of things like being “good on your word.” Like if you say you’re going to help your buddy move, you help him move. Even if it’s raining.

Or like when you’re a kid and you get in a fight. You don’t try to really hurt the other guy. Once somebody wins, you let up. You act in an honorable way.

Which is different from the qualities women value: compassion. Empathy. Helping people who can’t help themselves. These are also excellent characteristics for a person to have. But they are a little more female-coded.

But what if Jane was thinking of specific things, like she hates Trump and insists that I hate him too? That doesn’t seem fair.

The truth is that men and women approach politics differently. In the past, that was considered a good thing. That was the yin and yang of heterosexual relationships.

I thought back to past girlfriends. Had we always agreed about politics? Of course not. Had it caused problems in the relationships? Not really. In some ways, it made them stronger.

Beware the friend group

I still had to respond to Jane. What should I say? I went back through our original text conversation. There she was: nice, agreeable Jane. Just like I remembered.

So why the sudden need to clarify our values?

I concluded this was probably her friends. Or maybe her co-workers. Or maybe her therapist. Jane had told somebody about our date and they were advising her not to meet me until she had questioned me about my political orientation.

The response

I didn’t know what to write back. I started texting different things but then deleted them. And then I felt sad. Sad for her. Sad for myself. An invisible wall of toxic politics was being forced between us, blocking us from the simple pleasure of meeting up.

I finally texted: “I try not to discuss politics on the first date.” And then I said something like: “You don’t have to live like this. You can just have coffee with a person.”

She didn’t respond right away. Maybe she was thinking about it. I hoped she was.

But then the next morning we were unmatched. She had disappeared. Maybe she had blocked me? Then I felt even more sad. And I felt bad for her.

What could have been

But I still think about Jane. What if she had been the one? In another time, a less political era, we might have met for coffee, gone for a walk, made a connection.

She would put up with my male perspective. I would put up with her female perspective. Like men and women have been doing throughout human history.

Who knows what might have happened?

The Best Dating App Is Your Local Church

The best dating app can only start relationships. Churches can nurture and sustain them.

Is an influencer named 'Hoe_Math' our best hope to fix modern courtship?



The name sounds like something dreamed up on the set of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." A crude joke scrawled on a napkin during a particularly degenerate brainstorming session.

The man known as Hoe_Math admits as much. He chose the moniker before exploding across social media platforms. Before accumulating hundreds of thousands of followers, desperate for dating guidance. Before becoming the most brutally honest voice in relationship advice.

Modern dating is a rigged game with a broken scoreboard. Apps have turned romance into a dopamine casino, where the house always wins and the average guy always loses.

The origin is hazy. One story goes that a commenter once wrote, “It’s too early in the morning for ho math.” He liked it, branded it, and went with it. Sometimes, the clearest insights come disguised as barroom nonsense.

(Note: I reached out to Hoe_Math to confirm the origin, but received no reply by time of publication.)

Scientific precision

The name belies the wisdom contained within. Hoe_Math's content represents some of the most researched, thoughtfully presented dating advice available online. Every video dissects male-female dynamics with scientific precision, testifying to his alleged background in developmental psychology. Charts and graphs replace empty platitudes. Data replaces wishful thinking.

The approach is refreshingly mathematical. Hence the name. Dating becomes a series of equations to solve, variables to optimize, probabilities to calculate. Young men struggling with modern romance finally get concrete frameworks instead of vague encouragement. The advice works because it acknowledges uncomfortable realities that other creators ignore.

Most dating influencers peddle fantasy. They promise easy solutions to complex problems. Hoe_Math serves brutal truths with a sugarcoating of humor — laugh, wince, learn. His videos explain why certain strategies fail, why conventional wisdom leads to disappointment, why the dating market operates according to rules nobody wants to acknowledge.

No sex wars

His content speaks directly to young men lost in the wreckage of modern dating. But women gain just as much. His breakdowns of male psychology are tools for seeing through the fog of emotional misfires, mixed signals, and cultural confusion.

Unlike so many other individuals in the space, Hoe_Math doesn’t stoke the sex wars. He dissects them. He cuts past the noise and lays bare the primal instincts, the evolutionary wiring, the brutal incentives that shape modern dating. It’s not about blame. It’s about clarity. And in a landscape this dysfunctional, clarity is power.

What sets Hoe_Math apart is his humility. He doesn't present himself as a guru. He doesn't promise miraculous transformations. He's genuinely happy about his success and believes in his analysis of intersexual dynamics. But he maintains painful self-awareness about his limitations.

In fact, he considers himself too old to take advantage of his hard-won wisdom. In a viral post on X earlier this year, he wrote:

— (@)

His brutal honesty struck a nerve — and even landed on the radar of "Red Scare," the acid-tongued cultural podcast hosted by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova.

Bruised wisdom

The self-deprecation isn’t for show. He built his theories from personal failures — years of rejection, missteps, and romantic ruin. He isn’t preaching from a pedestal. He’s reporting from the rubble. That’s what makes it stick. There’s no hustle, no branding play. Just bruised wisdom, receipts of rejection, and data-backed despair.

The timing explains his explosive growth. Modern dating is a rigged game with a broken scoreboard. Apps have turned romance into a dopamine casino, where the house always wins and the average guy always loses.

Social media warps standards beyond recognition. Filters, thirst traps, and algorithm-fueled illusions have created a marketplace where attention, not character, is currency. The average man in his 20s or 30s now has a better chance of getting struck by lightning, hit by a falling air conditioner, or mauled by a gender studies major on Adderall than of finding the woman of his dreams on a dating app.

Starved for meaning

Amid this chaos, young people are starved for meaning. They need more than motivational fluff or red-pill rage. They need frameworks, truths they can actually apply. That’s what he offers.

His charts and diagrams make abstract concepts concrete. The "Sexual Market Value" discussions feel clinical rather than offensive. He maps how attractiveness, resources, and social status interact in modern dating. The framework explains why certain people succeed while others struggle.

Hoe_Math's SMV analysis reveals dramatic shifts since the 1990s. Back then, dating pools were geographically limited. Your competition was local. Social media didn't exist to showcase everyone else's highlights. Dating apps hadn't gamified romance into a brutal efficiency contest.

In the 1990s, a reasonably attractive person in a small town had genuine dating prospects. Today, that same person competes against algorithmically curated profiles from hundreds of miles away. The dating pool expanded infinitely. But so did the competition. Everyone's standards inflated accordingly.

RELATED: Digital castration: Why real men should ditch dating apps

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Starved for truth

Hoe_Math's charts illustrate this mathematical reality. Women on dating apps receive massive attention from desperate men. This attention distorts their perception of their own market value. They start believing they deserve partners far above their actual attractiveness level. The result is widespread dissatisfaction as expectations clash with reality.

Men face the opposite problem. Dating apps favor the top 10% of male profiles. Average men become invisible. Their market value crashes in digital spaces despite being perfectly viable partners in real-world contexts. The apps create artificial scarcity that benefits neither sex in the long term.

The phenomenon speaks to something deeper: a cultural starvation for truth. People are done listening to influencers pushing sanitized advice approved by HR departments. Hoe_Math breaks that mold. He isn’t pitching a brand or selling a fantasy. He’s a man who’s been crushed by the machine and lived to diagram it. The honesty cuts. His failures are functional. They forged the frameworks. In a world drowning in performative wellness and fake confidence, failure becomes a mark of authenticity. If he had started out successful, no one would care. The fact that he didn’t is the entire point.

Whether his ideas have staying power is almost irrelevant. Dating norms shift, trends mutate, platforms rise and fall. But right now, he offers structure in the chaos. He gives young men language for what they’re living through and women a mirror for what men silently endure.

That’s valuable. That’s rare. Hoe_Math might be anonymous. His name might be ridiculous. But the impact is real. His charts make sense of nonsense. His pain translates into structure. And in this era of swipe-fueled psychosis, that makes him a prophet worth listening to.

Even before it burned them, Tea was toxic for women



The viral women-only “dating safety” app, Tea, was a digital doxxing site cosplaying as “women empowerment” — and a reputational weapon against men everywhere.

But in a delicious twist of irony, after not one but two massive data breaches, it’s the women behind the screen who are now quaking in their boots.

To quote Michael Scott, “Well, well well, how the turntables.”

Tea wasn’t a step forward. It was a symptom. A glitch in a culture that’s forgotten how to talk to each other face-to-face.

The Tea app was marketed as a breakthrough for women’s safety — a sleek, viral whisper network dressed up as a tech solution for the modern dating world. It promised a digital sisterhood: a space where women could vet men, anonymously share “red flags,” and crowdsource protection in the Wild West of dating apps and swiping right.

But beneath the branding and the TikTok testimonials was something much darker: a platform that enabled digital doxxing with zero accountability, all under the guise of empowerment.

A Yelp for men

Through the app, women could upload a man’s name, number, or social media handle and attach either “green flags” or “red flags” — a kind of Yelp review for men. The intent, we’re told, was noble: Women warn each other about bad actors before wasting time or falling into danger.

But Tea offered none of the structures that real accountability requires. No requirement for evidence. No obligation to identify yourself. No meaningful way for the accused to defend themselves. It’s little surprise that what began as a tool for safety quickly turned into a tool for revenge and humiliation, based on pure speculation in the emotionally charged world of online dating.

And when Tea went viral on TikTok, launching it to the No. 2 spot on the Apple App Store, the stakes got even higher. With millions of users and near-instant exposure, a single anonymous red flag could follow someone indefinitely — without trial, without appeal, and without context.

Twisted irony

Tea just had another viral moment — and it wasn’t because of TikTok. The self-purported anonymous app had not one, but two major data breaches. Though the company reported that the breach exposed 72,000 user images (including driver’s licenses and selfies), other experts weighed in, claiming the breach was bigger than the company was letting on.

A security researcher, Kasra Rahjerdi, told 404 Media that he was able to access more than 1.1 million private messages from Tea's users. The messages included "intimate" conversations about topics ranging from rape and divorce to abortion and infidelity. Rahjerdi also said that several chats included personal information like phone numbers and locations to meet up.

However ironic the data breach is, it’s largely beside the point. Tea was flawed at its very core. No matter how noble the marketing, the model was always built on anonymity, unverified accusations, and reputational risk without recourse. It didn’t just fail to protect women — it encouraged them to wield unaccountable power over men and called it justice.

Digitized gossip

In the past, warning a friend about a man’s character came with weight. You did it face-to-face. You had to stand behind your words. You risked being wrong. You risked being held accountable. It wasn’t anonymous — it was personal. And because of that, it was taken seriously.

Tea tried to digitize that ancient role of communal discernment and strip it of all responsibility. But accountability without cost isn’t accountability — it’s just gossip. And digital gossip, unlike the whispered kind, doesn’t stay in the room. It stays online. Forever.

RELATED: Digital castration: Why real men should ditch dating apps

Dedraw Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Sure, women can be vengeful or petty. But Tea didn’t explode for that reason. It went viral because so many women are profoundly alone. We’ve lost the webs of embodied community that used to help us navigate love, danger, and everything in between — sisters, mothers, friends, pastors, neighbors. Into that vacuum stepped the algorithm. And it offered us the illusion of safety, in exchange for the erosion of truth, accountability, and community.

Tea wasn’t a step forward. It was a symptom. A glitch in a culture that’s forgotten how to talk to each other face-to-face — and how to seek justice in public, not in secret.

In the end, Tea didn’t just fail to keep women safe. It made all of us — men and women alike — more exposed, more suspicious, and more divided.

Putting Political Litmus Tests In Your Dating App Bio Is A Red Flag

When people only want political 'discussions' that confirm their biases, they make the vulnerability that relationships require impossible.

Digital castration: Why real men should ditch dating apps



“It’s convenient, but I like to see the things I’m buying in person before I spend my money on them.”

This is one of the most common complaints about the rise of Amazon and same-day delivery services. After all, we want to try on a pair of jeans before we buy them or physically see the apples at the grocery store so we don’t get bruised ones.

Dating and marriage should be a beautiful, loving process. But online, it becomes as predatory as LinkedIn.

But why doesn’t this same principle apply to dating?

In the digital age, online dating has become the standard method of meeting for adults seeking a serious relationship. Research shows that 10% of married adults in the U.S. met their spouses on a dating app, with that number rising to nearly 20% for those under 30. Further, 53% of people under 30 have used a dating app at some point.

This trend is no longer a rare, last-ditch attempt to find a partner, but has become the overwhelmingly normalized expectation for meeting a significant other.

'Love' on demand

At first glance, online dating seems harmless, if not beneficial.

It allows people to distinguish religious beliefs, physique preferences, and long-term relationship goals through a quick swipe through someone’s profile. This convenience can help prevent the awkward incompatibility of a butcher asking out a vegan.

But the cost of this commodity is authenticity. Fairy tales and rom-coms have a reputation for their tacky love-at-first-sight stories, where two people's eyes meet, someone tells a good joke, and a spark is lit between them. Many people's parents and grandparents met their spouses this way. For generations, high school sweethearts and chance encounters were the start of a typical love story.

The problem with online dating apps is that they take the humanity out of relationships. Individuals are trying to sell themselves, so they spend time crafting carefully manicured versions of themselves. They edit photos, reuse their friends’ witty one-liners, and leave out unattractive imperfections. Online dating is much more akin to a game of "Sims," where people become characters with hand-selected features who lack any shortcomings. Tinder users report going on two to four dates per week, often with different potential partners.

The process has become impersonal, with users trying to meet as many potential matches as possible in a desperate attempt to find someone who fits their desires.

Beta mode, activated

This detached style of relationship-building has completely removed masculinity from dating.

It begins with a lack of courage. Dating apps remove the age-old anxiety of just going up and talking to her. Men no longer have to initiate face-to-face contact. Instead, they can send half-hearted text messages behind the comfort of their phones.

It’s a small change, but it has meaningful impacts. It symbolizes waning gallantry.

The removal of physical interaction creates a disparity between reality and fiction. About 57% of women under 30 have received unsolicited explicit messages on dating apps. Without the corporeal link between two individuals, it becomes much easier for men to jump into the murky waters of unchecked vulgarity. The male attributes of confidence and leadership are used in perverted ways that ruin the chances of building meaningful relationships as ordained by God.

It’s not the fault of men.

This is the exploitative nature of online dating. Dating and marriage should be a beautiful, loving process. But online, it becomes as predatory as LinkedIn.

Seeking out a partner should be about finding someone with similar values, shared experiences, and who gives you butterflies. Instead, online dating turns the process into another networking system. People must pull from a handful of photos, a bit of basic information, and a few brief sentences about hobbies to sum up their entire being.

This is why online dating looking a lot like online shopping. Now, people swipe left for the most insignificant offenses, which Gen Z calls "the Ick." It's a superficial process that doesn’t rely on creating a genuine connection. It only fuels the ego.

Death of duty

Online dating, however, does result in a significant number of long-term serious relationships — but fewer and fewer marriages.

As growing numbers of young people turn to apps to find their partners, marriage rates among this group have significantly fallen. Worse, the proportion of young couples who have children has reached almost historic lows in the U.S.

Traditionally, men have always been the leaders in a relationship. They’re the ones who get down on one knee; they’re the ones tasked with protecting and providing for their families. Online dating slowly chips away at cultivating these types of men.

Relationships are built on responsibility. Without the authority of masculinity, these relationships are increasingly less fruitful. People are more likely to live with their partners without ever getting married. And if a couple do marry, they’re less likely to have children.

The burden of responsibility is cast aside because masculinity’s value has been degraded.

The sacred chase

Familial relationships are crucial to maintaining a healthy, balanced society. They are the building blocks of communities, the biblically ordained gift that structures Western civilization.

As online dating becomes the norm, it hides crucial elements of the human spirit. For all of human history, men learned to overcome their fear of the beautiful girl rejecting them by holding on to the hope that she might agree to a date. The uneasiness allowed for something holy to arise.

But the self-satisfaction created by flipping through people's profiles is the mark of an age held hostage by technology. If you don’t want the online food delivery service to leave bruised fruit on your doorstep, you should go to the farmers' market and pick some out for yourself.

Maybe while you’re there, you’ll walk by someone who seems nice and get the courage to go up and talk to her.

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11 teens face felony charges for allegedly using dating apps to lure, beat men as part of viral social media trend



Authorities in Illinois said 11 teens engaged in a viral social media trend of using dating apps to lure and beat men. The teenagers are facing felony charges for their alleged assaults.

The Mount Prospect Police Department said in a statement that a group of 11 teens attacked two men over the summer.

'We are asking parents to take these incidents as an opportunity to talk with their teenage children about the seriousness of actively participating in these types of trends they see on social media.'

A 41-year-old man told police a group of teens battered him around 9:45 p.m. July 8 in the parking lot of a business in Mount Prospect, roughly 20 miles northwest of Chicago.

"The victim related that he had utilized an online dating app to arrange to meet a person at that location," the Mount Prospect Police Department stated. "After arriving, the victim related that he was approached by a group of teenage males who confronted him verbally and battered him. Teenagers in the group also damaged the victim’s vehicle. The victim related he fled in the vehicle and was eventually able to get away from the group of teenagers, who followed him in their vehicles."

Within just 10 minutes of the first reported attack, a 23-year-old man contacted police about an assault that purportedly occurred about a mile away from the first alleged attack.

The second alleged victim said he was expecting to meet a person at the location where a group of teenagers reportedly battered him. He also claimed the teens damaged his vehicle, including slashing the tires of his car.

The alleged victim went to a nearby home, after which the Mount Prospect Fire Department transported him to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Police did not reveal which dating app the suspects used to allegedly lure the men.

Detectives with the Mount Prospect Police Department used surveillance video from the areas of the alleged attacks to identify possible suspects. Following an investigation, police determined that 11 juveniles participated in one or both of the alleged attacks.

Overall, 53 felony charges were brought against the juvenile suspects — including aggravated battery with great bodily harm, criminal damage to property, and mob action.

NBC News reported that one of the teen suspects was hit with two felony counts of hate crime charges for purportedly using "a racial and another derogatory term" during one of the alleged attacks, police said.

Police did not reveal the racial slur that the suspect allegedly shouted.

The Cook County State's Attorney’s Office approved all of the charges against the juvenile suspects.

None of the suspects' identities were revealed because all of them were minors. All of the suspects were males, 10 of whom were 17 years old; one was 16.

Police said all of the suspects turned themselves in last month and were transported to Chicago's Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.

The suspects allegedly informed investigators that they got the idea for the alleged attacks from a viral social media trend they saw online.

“We are asking parents to take these incidents as an opportunity to talk with their teenage children about the seriousness of actively participating in these types of trends they see on social media,” said Mount Prospect Police Chief Mike Eterno.

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Circe Says: Ancient wisdom for modern problems



Circe is an ancient Greek minor goddess who spends her days on X, chronicling the late-stage American empire and dispensing advice on life and love in the digital era. You can submit your advice questions to her directly at Circe @vocalcry.

Let's say you wanted to escape a cult. Let’s say the cult is academia, to keep things abstract. How would you do it?

When you consider that the number of people with freshly minted PhDs every year far exceeds the number of people who join the Church of Scientology, it is worth asking how academia continues to find young recruits willing to give away years of their productive lives to engage in esoteric rituals in near poverty and social isolation for a slim chance at life-of-the-mind transcendence.

The one quality that most cult members share is that they’re looking for an all-powerful mentor (or, in your case, a dissertation advisor) — a figurative daddy who will reward them when they’re good and scold them when they’re bad. Academics have this in spades. They’ve never developed an identity outside of being the teacher’s pet, and they struggle to make decisions without envisioning what grade they will get on their report card in life.

Leaving academia involves recognizing that you’re in a cult and learning to accept that there is no final report card. The only grade you’ll get in life is pass/fail, which will only be awarded to you by a higher power. If you can come to terms with this, you might have a chance at escape. And if you can’t, joining a tech startup is always an option.

I have read many 'red-pill' books to try to understand what men want. They all seem to be aimed at manipulating a woman’s desire for love to extract intimacy, only to lose interest in the woman afterward. I am losing hope about relationships and genuinely questioning why these men express that their version of true love is harems and cheating. Do any men truly love women? Is this really what love is about?

A healthy relationship with both parents and a normal adolescent romantic awakening: no “red-pill” guru had both. Like all ideologies constructed around a master narrative to explain the world, “red-pill” concepts are founded on a grain of truth and distorted to massive proportions to attract a target audience. In this sense, the “red pill” is no different from Marxism, radical feminism, or any other ideology that preys on minds desperate for clarity in a world that is full of complexity.

It is true that, on average, there are biological and psychological differences between men and women that require a theory of mind to appreciate fully and that being aware of these differences can help bridge the gap between the sexes, especially in the context of a relationship. The “red pill” organizes some of these differences into a seemingly coherent worldview that serves as a basis to justify the manipulation of women by men to often unsavory ends.

It is worth noting, however, that every single “red-pill” guru eventually repents and comes to the conclusion that a monogamous relationship with one woman is more fulfilling than living like a degenerate. Dan Bilzerian is only the most recent in a long line of “red-pill” prodigal sons — without exception, all of these men eventually reach the same conclusion.

It is also worth noting that the average well-socialized, well-adjusted man will never consume red-pill content, let alone create red-pill content. This latter pool of men is the one you should be fishing in when looking for love, which is a very real and wonderful thing. I cannot tell you where or when you will find your Prince Charming, but I can categorically tell you that he will not have internet brainworms.

Are you wasting a girl's time by continuing to date her if, after six months, you can't yet see a future involving marriage but otherwise have no good reason to break up? If so, how to best end things without sounding mean? If not, how long do you wait to see if marital visions develop?

The short answer is yes, and the long answer is also yes.

Most men know when they meet the woman they want to build a future with early on, usually much earlier than six months. If it hasn’t developed, it isn’t likely to develop with the passage of time. If you are looking for a wife (presumably, she’s looking for a husband), then not seeing a future involving marriage IS a good reason to break up. Not only is it a good reason, it’s the best reason.

Every day you spend with a person you don’t see a future with is a day you’re robbing from both of you [time] that can be spent either in search of a spouse or in the company of that spouse. It is never pleasant to end things, but be honest about not seeing a future even if you can only offer vague reasons as to why. A woman will be far less upset about being rejected after six months than about being strung along for years only to eventually break up anyway and hear that you married another woman that you met only six months ago.

Console yourself with the thought that 10 years from now, you’ll both be happily married to other people and that you’re taking a step today to ensure that future. And if the thought of ending up with other people instead of one other makes you sad and regretful, maybe it’s worth reconsidering and buying a ring. But please — no moissanite.

I have a raging desire to set my boss on fire, and I’m exhausted by this and want it to end. How do I get over my desire to set my boss on fire?

Buy a ticket to Burning Man and superimpose your boss’s face onto the burning effigy with the Apple Vision Pro. Or you can just find a new job.

Circe, how do I get over relentless heartbreak?

Barthes and Stendhal exhausted many words on this very dilemma to no avail, but as a 1000+-year-old goddess (though who’s counting), I’ve had centuries to test out various theories (turning your beloved’s object of affection into a sea monster does NOT work), and I’m here to offer practical solutions.

First, give yourself a predetermined period to grieve. Watch sad movies, vent to anyone who will listen, read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" — whatever makes all of those melancholy feelings bubble to the surface. Don’t bury ... them; tragedy cleanses the soul. But you MUST be disciplined about the cut-off time for this period.

Second, do not have any contact with this person. Hide any and all evidence of their existence. Do not stalk their social media. Do not ask your friends about them. For all intents and purposes, you must disappear them from your life.

Third, make a list of everything you dislike about them, even if it’s totally ridiculous minutiae — their shoes, their eyebrows, anything that inspires even mild distaste. Anytime you reminisce about them, read the list. Read it again. Then eat a cookie. This is no longer the time for philosophical musings. You must not be above subjecting yourself to operant conditioning.

Fourth, find a way to distract yourself with something that gives you purpose: work, friends, hobbies, etc. Getting in shape never hurts. Keep busy in a way that feels productive.

If you follow this plan without cheating, you are guaranteed to feel better in about six months. Trust me, if I can get over Glaucus, you can get over anyone.

These studies suggest we might be VERY wrong about Gen Z



Gen Z – those born between the years 1997 and 2012 – get a bad rap. They’re often characterized as lazy, entitled, chronically anxious tech addicts.

And while there may be some truth to that stereotype, statistics show that Zoomers are actually better than we’ve been led to believe.

Isabel Brown, a Gen Z author and conservative voice, shared some pleasantly surprising news with Dave Rubin about America’s most challenging generation.

Due to smart devices and advancing technology, modern society has adapted to be heavily virtual, and apparently Gen Z is tired of it.

“Gen Z is saying, ‘You know, we want a little bit more than that. We want more substance; we want more purpose,'” says Isabel, adding that “dating is maybe the best example of what that looks like.”

“There are several articles that have come out in the last few months about how Match, the group which owns Tinder and Hinge and several other competing companies, is freaking out about how to retain Gen Z as a customer base because 90%+ of us say we’ve had horrible experiences on the app,” she explains.

But online dating isn’t the only table Gen Z is turning.

“Gen Z women are overwhelmingly throwing away our birth control because no matter where you fall in the partisan political spectrum [and] no matter what your intimacy life looks like, we realize we're feeling really sick, and we're slowly poisoning ourselves in the process,” says Isabel.

But this next statistic might be the most shocking.

According to “a study that just came out,” “93% of us … still want to get married,” she tells Dave, adding that this is most surprising because we’re currently living “in a time where we have the lowest marriage rate in American history.”

Further, despite what we’ve been told, “Gen Z is actually breaking more conservative than at least the two previous generations,” which is the crux of Isabel’s newest book, “The End of the Alphabet.”

“When I say [conservative], it doesn’t necessarily mean the red MAGA hat,” she says. Rather, it means “ culturally embracing traditional values.”

“What does every young generation have in common throughout all of human history?” she asks. “We want to rebel against the people who came before.”

For Zoomers, “‘sticking it to the man’ is quite literally believing there is such a thing as objectivism. It means wanting to get married instead of sleep with as many people as humanly possible and follow the advice of the manosphere or the radical feminism community. It's wanting to have kids in a society that's begging you ‘don't have kids for the sake of your career, for the sake of the environment, for the sake of your personal life.”’

Even the hustle and bustle of city life, which generally attracts a younger crowd, is becoming less desirable.

Studies show that “we’re moving out of big cities” because “we want more suburban or rural areas to reconnect with nature,” says Isabel, adding that younger generations are also “eating real food in a time where everything is hyper-processed or full of chemicals or even grown in a laboratory.”

But perhaps most shocking of all is that Gen Z is embracing the idea of a higher power again. To hear more about this unexpected renewed interest in God despite “our hyper-atheistic society,” watch the clip below.


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